Following a highly successful ¥59 billion transaction, the Japanese telecommunications giant announced it is pivoting away from complex wireless infrastructure to focus on the much simpler business of holding flat patches of soil.
TOKYO—Following a highly successful ¥59 billion transaction, Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Docomo announced Tuesday it will be pivoting its core business model away from complex wireless infrastructure and toward the vastly easier strategy of selling patches of empty dirt.
The telecom operator, which previously spent decades and billions of dollars laying fiber-optic cables, launching satellites, and maintaining cellular towers across the archipelago, reportedly experienced a corporate epiphany after making $371 million simply by handing over the deeds to two unbuilt parcels of land in central Tokyo. Internal memos indicate the company’s board of directors was stunned to learn that generating massive revenue did not require managing millions of customer data plans or repairing weather-damaged 5G nodes, but could instead be achieved by doing absolutely nothing to a flat rectangle of ground and then giving it to someone else.
We have thousands of engineers working around the clock to optimize signal latency, but it turns out the real money is in having previously purchased a barren lot near a subway station.
Sato added that the company is completely halting its research into next-generation 6G networks, noting that the return on investment for holding onto a completely featureless expanse of soil for a few years was mathematically superior to providing reliable internet to 80 million people.
Financial analysts immediately upgraded the company's stock, praising NTT Docomo's transition from a telecommunications provider weighed down by the burden of providing an actual service, to an agile, forward-thinking holding company of stationary grass. Industry experts predict rival network operators like SoftBank and KDDI will soon follow suit, potentially leaving the nation without cell service as major conglomerates rush to liquidate the physical crust of the Earth.
In light of Japan's booming real estate market, NTT Docomo executives confirmed the company will begin aggressively ripping out its existing fiber-optic cables to better expose the highly lucrative soil beneath them, and has already begun advising disgruntled mobile customers to try shouting their messages across the newly cleared, premium-priced lots.